3/26/2009 @ 5:40PM

How To Buy Affordable Wine

As the economic crisis crunches budgets, the good news for wine drinkers is that the affordable-wine category is more robust than ever. According to the U.S. Wine Market Study from market research group Impact Databank, wine that retails for $10 per bottle and under constitutes 66% of the U.S. wine markets roughly $30 billion in annual sales.

But how to choose from all the colorful labels and friendly-sounding names? Walking into a discount wine or liquor store, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

To come up with some helpful advice, I took $100 and bought 10 bottles at a discount wine store. I picked five whites and five reds (the total, with tax, came to $97.97), then had master sommelier Richard Betts, co-founder of Betts & Scholl wines, taste each pick. Betts makes and regularly tastes wines from some of the most prestigious regions in the world. Among my selections, Betts found a few pleasant surprises and a couple of disappointments.

The strategy that proved most effective: knowing when a good region had a great year, as was the case for Bordeaux in 2005. A great resource is wine writer Jancis Robinson’s vintage list.

The store I patronized offered several well-known Bordeaux selections from 2006, but an unfamiliar label, Château Tour Biggore, was the only 2005 bottle, and cost a mere $8. This turned out to be Betts’ favorite wine of the 10.

Italy is also widely regarded to have had a solid 2005, so the same strategy was successful with the Tato Montepulciano d’Abruzzo ($8). Betts didn’t like the cheesy label with its black background and graphic of a mosaic sunburst, but he did like the contents. “It’s simple, country Italian wine–you would mistake this for a $30 Valpolicella,” he observes.

Going with familiarity also resulted in good finds. That is, if you’ve had a wine from one producer before and liked it, you’ll probably like one of the other wines it makes. French negotiant Jean-Luc Colombo offers wines costing from $9 to more than $90, which tend to be consistently good. The Cotes-du-Rhone Blanc ($10) turned out to be a safe bet. Betts liked the wine for its “pretty peach, apricot and orange blossom” characters, as well as its “stony minerality.”

The Letdowns

Unfortunately, sticking with the familiar didn’t always yield a palatable pick. Betts’ least-favorite wine of the tasting was the Villa Maria Unoaked Chardonnay Hawkes Bay ($9) from New Zealand. This is one of the most reputable wineries in New Zealand, the bottle coming from one of the country’s best regions in a very solid year. But Betts says the wine tasted oily, oxidized and overly buttery.

The best chardonnays from Hawkes Bay tend to be higher-priced. They’re typically balanced, fruity, tangy and easy to drink. The lesson I learned: If wines from a solid region and year tend to cost significantly more than the price tag on the bottle in front of you, that might be cause to steer clear.

Don’t write off Villa Maria for good (the winery makes excellent sauvignon blanc and pinot noir), but if the price doesn’t fit the brand, the region and the year, it’s possible there’s a good reason the bottle is in the bargain bin.

Opting for ubiquitous brands you’ve never tried before can also lead you astray. It’s seemingly hard to find a discount retailer that doesn’t sell Indaba wines from South Africa, so the brand’s shiraz seemed to be a safe bet at $6. While Betts found the wine to be varietally correct (shiraz that tastes like shiraz), the wine smelled manufactured and tasted overly sweet.

Granted, that style may be to your liking, and $6 isn’t much to spend to find out. But in general, if you stick with solid reference points and experience, your money won’t be wasted.